sighed. “Maybe it’s okay here, for us to be together. But this isn’t the world.”
“I can be brave,” she told him. When he didn’t answer, she squeezed his hand and pulled him to his feet. “Want to see my old room?” she asked, remembering what he’d told her at that party long ago. A closed mouth doesn’t get fed. Bethie led him into the house, up the stairs, and into the attic, where she’d stayed when she’d first washed up in Atlanta, broken and lost and hating herself.
Harold looked around. There were three single beds in iron frames, a blue-and-white rag rug on the floor and, on a table pushed underneath a window, a record player and a stack of albums. He knelt, flipped through them, pulled one out, and settled it onto the turntable. “Some enchanted evening,” Bethie heard Frank Sinatra singing from South Pacific. “You may see a stranger, / You may see a stranger, across a crowded room.” Tears stung her eyes. Harold turned to her, opening his arms, and Bethie stepped into his embrace, settling her cheek against his shoulder, which felt as solid as she’d hoped. She pulled him close, until he was leaning against her, letting him know, without words, that she could be strong, that she could support him, that she could be what he needed, just as he was what she needed.
PART
four
1987
Jo
Nana, Nana!” Lila shouted, racing out of the car and into Sarah’s arms. Jo braced herself for scoldings, for her mother’s pursed lips and pointed fingers, but as her teenagers emerged from the station wagon, stretching and yawning, she saw that Sarah was actually giving Lila a hug.
Kindred spirits, Jo thought, and immediately felt guilty for comparing her youngest daughter to her intolerant, censorious mother . . . but, if she was being honest, she had to admit that the two of them had a surprising affinity. The Wicked Witch of the West has found her apprentice, was how Dave put it, and Jo would flush with frustration, not knowing which one of them she was supposed to defend.
“I made rugelach,” Sarah announced, leading Lila into the little brick house on Alhambra Street. In 1985, after twenty-five years at Hudson’s, Sarah had taken a retirement package, but had refused to move, even though, by then, Bethie could have bought her a house in Bloomfield Hills if she’d wanted one. Why should I move? Sarah had asked. Why do I need all those empty rooms to clean? She gardened and played bridge and had a regular mah-jongg game, and although she had no real friends, as far as Bethie could tell, she had a range of acquaintances. She’d joined the synagogue’s Community of Care and delivered meals to new mothers twice a week. “I get to hold the babies. That’s the best part,” she’d say. For a while, she’d look meaningfully at Bethie’s midriff when she talked about the babies. Bethie suspected that, at some point, Harold must have taken her aside and explained that no additional grandchildren would be forthcoming. Either that, or the passage of time had done the trick, because right around Bethie’s fortieth birthday, the comments had stopped.
For this visit, to celebrate Sarah’s seventieth birthday, the plan was for the girls to stay with Sarah, all three of them in the bedroom that had once belonged to Bethie and Jo, and Jo was already prepared for Missy and Kim to beg to be allowed to stay with the adults at the hotel instead. It’s so dark there, Missy said. It was true that the maple tree had grown to a towering height, and that its leaves kept most of the house in the shade, but that wasn’t what Missy meant. Over the years Jo and Bethie (mostly Bethie) had paid for improvements to the property—a new roof in ’82, new carpeting the year after that, and all new kitchen appliances the year after that. The driveway had been repaved, the landscaping redone, but for all that, the house still felt unchanged. The new kitchen floor was tile, not linoleum, but somehow there was already a worn spot in front of the sink, and Jo suspected that her mother purchased the lowest-wattage light bulbs on the market to save money, which kept the place dim.
“Come on in, everyone,” Sarah said as Bethie and Harold arrived. While Jo and Dave had made the trip from Connecticut by car, her sister and brother-in-law had flown from Atlanta and rented a four-door